Utilizing Bio-fuel Beyond Experimental Use 384
grumpyman writes "A C$14 million factory near Montreal started producing biodiesel fuel two weeks ago from the bones, innards and other parts of farm animals. At full capacity plant will produce 35 million liters (9.2 million U.S. gallons) of biodiesel a year, the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing 16,000 light trucks or 22,000 cars from the roads."
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Animal Rights? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
The second part where the fuel comes from peanut or other oils- I fail to see how that can be beneficial. Farm tractors burn diesel to harvest the peanuts, fetiziliers made from and processed with petroleum are throw into the field, and then energy is needed to harvest the oils. If this can all be done with some much greater output than input- then great- but from what I have seen- often times these other factors are not taken into account.
Farm tractors that burn biodiesel or SVO (Score:3, Interesting)
Farm tractors burn diesel to harvest the peanuts
And farmers can cut the process's net carbon contribution by running their tractors on biodiesel. In the future they may be modified to burn straight vegetable oil [journeytoforever.org], using diesel only to start up and shut down the engine.
fetiziliers made from and processed with petroleum are throw into the field
Not all farming methods use petrofertilizers.
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
The real question is, when you factor in all the costs associated with hydrogen - new infrastructure, new vehicles, renewable energy sources to manufacture the hydrogen (without which it is pointless), is there any way hydrogen can be cheaper than biodiesel?
Re:Have you ever??? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have followed my friend who has a biodiesel burning Dodge/Cummins truck from Nashville, Tn to Dayton, Oh. (among other trips that are 100s of miles) I didn't see any "white smoke".
Have you ever smelled a biodiesel vehicle in operation or at rest? Uhg! What a stench.
The slight smell of french fries maybe, but I like french fries. No worse than any other diesel.
Have you ever driven a biodiesel vehicle? They are a bit quieter than when running on regular diesel but they also lack power compared to when running on regular diesel.
He pulls a huge trailer packed with heavy gear all over the southeast when going to hamfests. It has plenty of power.
Re:Biodiesel not the answer (Score:1, Interesting)
Biodiesel can be made from peanut oil, or it can be made from salt water algae; imagine salt water being pumped into Arizona into huge vats. The potential is to produce over 10,000 gallons per acre per year [wikipedia.org]. Doing the math shows you can account for the US's total consumption in about 525 square miles. And since any CO2 output from burning biodiesel would be negated by the step in which CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere when the algae is farmed, the result is net-zero emissions.
Re:Experimental? (Score:3, Interesting)
You put unleaded in with your biodiesel! Does that work? I would have thought you would mix in normal fossil based diesel fuel, NOT unleaded. Surely unleaded would cause damage to your engine.
you underestimate how much meat Americans eat (Score:1, Interesting)
And if it's not enough? Well, if everyone's running diesel anyway, you can also make diesel fuel from coal.
Turkey guts (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the statistics that Changing World cited was that if you could convert all the agricultural WASTE in the US to oil, that would do away with the need to import oil. If that statistic is true, then what Rothsay has done is really important. If their process is actually economical then they have beaten Changing World to the prize.
The other thing not to be ignored is that the Changing World process, and this one too presumably, destroys the prions that cause mad cow disease. This process may take animal carcasses out of the livestock feed chain by providing an alternate market for slaughterhouse refuse and dead stock.
On the other hand, their business stinks, literally, and I don't expect that to change. Anyway, I hope they succeed.
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:1, Interesting)
On the hydrogen side of things, what prevents us from building "gas" stations (for lack of a better term) with solar arrays on the roof? There's always a pretty substantial superstructure over the pumps of a modern gas station, so put some power generation equipment up there (windmills? solar panels? trombe walls [google.com] with water coils and turbines?), and run that power to a H20-separator/storage tank buried where the gasoline storage tanks would be in a current design. Then put a sign out that shows the current price based on how full the tank is (supply at that location) plus the inevitable markup. There's your hydrogen fuel generator, and the stations can sell off oxygen for medical uses as well. There's no need for trucking large tanks of extremely explosive stuff around (eliminates a few tank-truck jobs, so the Teamsters will be pissed), making the roads a tiny bit safer for everyone.
After all, the bottleneck in production is due to having a central facility and a distribution chain. Distributing the production mechanism is the easiest way of reducing that bottleneck. (You could compare it to a mainframe+terminals vs. a PC network.)
Very happy with biodiesel in my VW Jetta TDI (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem currently I have with it is trying to find it in great quantities. I fill up at a CENEX agricultural co-op gas station. They have B2, which is 98% dino diesel, 2% bio. It's still mostly dino diesel, of course, which annoys me. But it's better than nothing. What I really want is B20, which is 20% bio, 80% dino. And during the summer, I want to try progressively higher ratios of bio to dino diesel. Volkswagen officially approves using B5. I'm pretty sure then it can take a higher grade biodiesel.
The problem of availability will be overcome in good time. There are b.d. production centers opening up around the country, everywhere from Oklahoma to Nevada, and one coming soon near Madison, Wisconsin (which is near to me). I'm contemplating opening a biodiesel fueling station in Milwaukee. Anyone interested? I regularly post about b.d./alt.energy on my blog [wisconsinite.net]; you can easily reach me through there.
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:PETA (Score:1, Interesting)
Quite apart from rights issues, farm animals are an incredibly INefficient way to make fuel. The general rule of thumb in ecology is every time you take a step up the food chain, it takes an order of magnitude more energy. That is, 100 pounds of plants to make 10 pounds of herbivore to make 1 pound of carnivore.
If you want to make biodiesel, it is therefore roughly 10 times more efficient NOT to run your plants through animal digestion first. This makes intuitive sense -- think how much you ate from age 0-18 vs. how much you weighed. Mammals in particular burn most of their calories just to maintain body temperature (warm-bloodedness).
On top of that, the main crops fed to cows and pigs are corn and soybeans. (While cows can graze, all the larger operations use feedlots because grazing cattle need much more land.) As another poster noted, http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html [journeytoforever.org] these are among the lowest-yield crops on the chart in terms of biodiesel production. Therefore animal biodiesel is another order of magnitude less efficient than directly using the highest-yield plants. And if you end up only using the waste products, it's probably another two orders of magnitude less productive (if we assume 10% waste, then it's another 10-to-1 input to biodiesel output, and then perhaps another 10-to-1 trying to extract biodiesel from parts like bones and organs, as the high-yield fat/lard is already used for other purposes). This means animal biodiesel waste yield is probably roughly about 1/10,000th that of the best plants.
I doubt protests at fuel pumps because animal biodiesel will most likely remain a novelty due to its inefficiency -- most excess parts already go to other industries (like make-up), so the amount of biodiesel produced will probably be negligible compared to plants.
As a fun fact, animal inefficiency is why historically only the rich could afford to eat meat. You need either to waste most of your food cycling it through animals (eating a pound of corn kernels and potatoes vs. 1.6 ounces of meat) or use a lot of land to graze them (around 9 acres per cow). Gout was seen as a disease of the wealthy; it's caused by excess uric acid, largely from meat. Many of our biggest killers, like heart disease, have a dietary basis -- we aren't made to process meat every meal of every day, we aren't carnivores.
As another fun fact, pretty much all the scenarios for supporting a crowded planet involve everyone becoming a vegetarian, also due to agricultural yields for animals being too low. Of course the very rich might still eat them...
mod parent down (Score:3, Interesting)
Making fuel from corn however is not nearly as good an idea as making it from plants such as hemp.
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
People are selfish. They don't care about anybody but themselves. It's what makes capitalism work so you can't undo it either.
Re:Automotive fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, on top of all of this, we are ignoring the fact that the waste is still radioactive, which means we can still draw power from it, even if it's at a much reduced scale. Combine that with heavy water and you get an almost geothermal-like effect, hot water rising, turns a turbine, releases heat, falls over the side into a collection tank which circulates its way back into the bottom of the tank. Of course, this would be a closed system, and you wouldn't have a "chain" reaction, but it's a good way to continue to draw power from it, while also keeping an eye on it.
Besides, nobody really needs your high five; if they're a small start up, they can get the attention of other small start ups, join forces, grow, acquire, grow.. and what you end up with is the environmentally friendly enron. Of course countries like Brazil would still laugh at you for entering the game so late, but hell, cheap fuel created from what's otherwise waste. Hard to beat. Economies of Scale will definitely help with a lot of the problem Biodiesel is having now, especially as the companies become more aware of each other. And as the infrastructure already exists, you just have to get the farmers, waste oil management companies, resteraunt chains and such onboard (which, to be truthful wouldn't be as hard as it sounds; you're offering to take their waste off their hands for virtually nothing to turn it into fuel which brings more food and thus more customers to them. It's win win).
Europe (Score:3, Interesting)
And they don't. Cut them, I mean. A friend of mine lives in the UK and has told me stories about how you can go to jail for using biodiesel you make yourself because it isn't subject to the same exorbitant taxes their petrofuels are.
What apparently goes right over Parliament's heads is that they have a huge opportunity to lead the way in alternative fuels technology, but I guess they just don't think their constituents are interested. Maybe they aren't.